Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Yesterday Ankur invited me to read his blog. A blog on "Blind Programmers and Users". Before reading, I depicted a different meaning of Blind Programmer, i thought its someone who codes blindly :). But its something else. It gives a different domain to think how blind people (can)use computer or rather our application. Can they use it ? Can they interpret it into their 3rd eye ? Can they play with some of the computer apps ?

No idea at all ! I never thought for it before and so i decided to spend some of my time to search what applications are developed for them. Some of the software's even I can think of like creating sound pattern with Morse code.

Searching on google, i came across a very nice and i will say a very simple software " Desktop Icon Reader". What this software do is that it attach a song file to every icon on desktop and even giving you the facility to record that sound file, so that you can give it a logical meaning. Mouse movement just play that sound. Nicely written by a 26 yr guy(better to say a computer scientist :) ).

See the baseline is very clear, computer screen is not going to provide something like "touch and feel". So we have to constrain application in the range of listening and speaking. Something we can simulate on listening like this Icon Reader and some other we can simulate on speaking like text generator via sound.

I was thinking of an application where i can provide them the facility to read a web page. Really no idea how to do but I guess languages like JS gives me the facility to read string over mouse by some API's like onMouseMove or onMouseClick and then if we are able to convert that string into a voice form! I guess it should be better fit in a browser property rather than a 3rd party application because the browser code has much more control on web page content. Also, we have one constraint, we can store a finite set of voice corresponding to every word. So, its the browser responsibility to convert a normal web page into a blind-friendly web page where we have a finite(mean to say less) number of words. Don't know how to handle names and all.

Sunday, March 25, 2007

India is out of the World Cup(news channels are using a sophisticated word "virtually out"). Performance of the team is not very good, but not as bad as covered by most of our News channel. If you put any news channel you will definite heard some words like "Janta ke adalat", "Future of indian team","who is the new captain" and all rubbish.

The problem is old, as said by my friend, in India there are 11 players and half a billion coach. That's true !! Everyone is ready to pass their expert comments... I guess even I :). And most of us like cricketers not cricket(I am not in this list :D).

Thursday, March 22, 2007

I am not anti-Internet Explorer user, but most of time I love to use Mozilla. It gives me the facility to restore the session and so perfect for my "hanging" system. Look at the message on the home page of Mozilla(so funny).

Hey!Your copy of Mozilla is more than four weeks old. Unless you are using the latest milestone build, bug reports get rapidly less useful the older your copy is.

So if you're not running the latest milestone, we could use your help testing either that or the latest nightly build. (Be warned that nightly builds are development software,and there is no guarantee that they won't fry your processor, insult your mother, or cause you to break out in a nasty rash.)

Congratulations!You've downloaded (or compiled) a copy of Mozilla. This means that you've volunteered to become part of the Mozilla testing community. (If that doesn't sound like something you meant to do, you might be better off with one of our stable releases.)

Thursday, March 15, 2007

Friday, March 09, 2007

It was a chat going on at 11.30 night with my office team members. Since the team is dominated with Bihari people in number, often the discussion comes on Bihar and it goes through a cycle of corruption, Laloo. So what's good ?

I don't have too much. But there is something which is related to me, my earth, to my birth-my village. My village is next to Madhubani. Most of us heard the name Madhubani, the literal meaning is forests of honey(madhu-bani) because of its great painting, often called Mithila painting. Mithila is our native language, though i speak less but its the sweetest i ever heard. Mithila painting is one of the splendid paintings ever done in the history of human culture.

Wiki page is telling me, this style of painting originated at the time of the Ramayana, when King Janak commissioned artists to do paintings at the time of marriage of his daughter, Sita, to Hindu God Lord Ram.

And here goes the worst part... We are selling Mithila painting in 20-30 Rs to some local Bihari broker. He in turns sell it to some big brokers into 3000-4000 Rs and finally it is imported to US and other nations costs in lakhs.Just checking the cost of one simple painting in $$$$'s

Waiting for next visit to my village, I will also make a collection of them :)